Learning to Control Emulated Muscles in Real Robots: Towards Exploiting Bio-Inspired Actuator Morphology

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Schumacher, Pierre, Krause, Lorenz, Schneider, Jan, Büchler, Dieter, Martius, Georg, Haeufle, Daniel
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Schumacher, Pierre
Krause, Lorenz
Schneider, Jan
Büchler, Dieter
Martius, Georg
Haeufle, Daniel
author_facet Schumacher, Pierre
Krause, Lorenz
Schneider, Jan
Büchler, Dieter
Martius, Georg
Haeufle, Daniel
contents Recent studies have demonstrated the immense potential of exploiting muscle actuator morphology for natural and robust movement -- in simulation. A validation on real robotic hardware is yet missing. In this study, we emulate muscle actuator properties on hardware in real-time, taking advantage of modern and affordable electric motors. We demonstrate that our setup can emulate a simplified muscle model on a real robot while being controlled by a learned policy. We improve upon an existing muscle model by deriving a damping rule that ensures that the model is not only performant and stable but also tuneable for the real hardware. Our policies are trained by reinforcement learning entirely in simulation, where we show that previously reported benefits of muscles extend to the case of quadruped locomotion and hopping: the learned policies are more robust and exhibit more regular gaits. Finally, we confirm that the learned policies can be executed on real hardware and show that sim-to-real transfer with real-time emulated muscles on a quadruped robot is possible. These results show that artificial muscles can be highly beneficial actuators for future generations of robust legged robots.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_05371
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning to Control Emulated Muscles in Real Robots: Towards Exploiting Bio-Inspired Actuator Morphology
Schumacher, Pierre
Krause, Lorenz
Schneider, Jan
Büchler, Dieter
Martius, Georg
Haeufle, Daniel
Robotics
Recent studies have demonstrated the immense potential of exploiting muscle actuator morphology for natural and robust movement -- in simulation. A validation on real robotic hardware is yet missing. In this study, we emulate muscle actuator properties on hardware in real-time, taking advantage of modern and affordable electric motors. We demonstrate that our setup can emulate a simplified muscle model on a real robot while being controlled by a learned policy. We improve upon an existing muscle model by deriving a damping rule that ensures that the model is not only performant and stable but also tuneable for the real hardware. Our policies are trained by reinforcement learning entirely in simulation, where we show that previously reported benefits of muscles extend to the case of quadruped locomotion and hopping: the learned policies are more robust and exhibit more regular gaits. Finally, we confirm that the learned policies can be executed on real hardware and show that sim-to-real transfer with real-time emulated muscles on a quadruped robot is possible. These results show that artificial muscles can be highly beneficial actuators for future generations of robust legged robots.
title Learning to Control Emulated Muscles in Real Robots: Towards Exploiting Bio-Inspired Actuator Morphology
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05371